REBROADCAST: Portland Author Karen Thompson Walker on ‘The Dreamers’

Today, we revisit a conversation from February 22, 2019 with Portland writer Karen Thompson Walker whose recent novel explores the terrifying possibility of a world altered by a highly contagious disease. The disease causes people to fall into a seemingly endless sleep. We talked to Thompson Walker about her book, “The Dreamers.”

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We’re going to listen back today to my 2019 interview with the novelist Karen Thompson Walker who writes best selling books of mystery and menace, but also beauty and grace. In her debut novel, “The Age of Miracles,” the earth’s rotation on its axis slows and a whole cascade of ecological and human disasters follows. Her second novel is called “The Dreamers.” It’s quieter, but just as devastating. A mysterious illness is sweeping through a college town, putting people into a deep sleep from which they might never awaken. In both books, Thompson Walker sets up a kind of scientific experiment and then probes what happens with rigorous curiosity and an empathetic heart.

Miller [2019 interview]: Karen Thompson Walker, it’s great to have you on the show.

Karen Thompson Walker: Thank you so much for having me.

Miller: What was the starting point for your new novel, “The Dreamers,” about this mysterious sleeping sickness?

Thompson Walker: I guess I’ve always had a sort of, I don’t know, odd, but I think common interest in contagion stories for a long time. I’m just quick to sort of see the movie that has to do with contagion stories or quick to read in a horrifying way when there’s stories of epidemics around the world. So I’ve always been interested in that and one of my favorite books is called “Blindness” by José Saramago, which is about a contagion of a strange blindness. So, that was sort of in my head.

Miller: What do you love about that book?

Thompson Walker: I love how it treats so seriously this bizarre and imaginary contagion of this strange blindness, where everyone goes blind. I think it does a good job of showing ... It treats this odd premise in a really serious way and does a good job of illuminating all different kinds of humanity, like all the different characters and how they react to the strange and terrible in that book situation. And that it was a big influence for this book.

Miller: There are a lot of things to be afraid of though in 2019: climate change and war and famine and terrorism and deepening political dysfunction. How did sleep itself become an exciting, animating force for you as the locus of the fear?

Thompson Walker: Yeah. I think I’m very interested in fear, and how it does and does not drive our sort of lives and decisions. And you’re right, there’s so much going on right now that’s very specific to this moment that is frightening. But I think, in a way, I enjoy writing about, inventing a premise that will channel some of those feelings of dread and worry, but in a way that is slightly removed from our reality. So that’s why this sort of mysterious sleeping sickness felt like the right … it was a way of exploring some of that fear and dread, but yet also traveling into a kind of space of wonder and the uncanny.

Miller: I wonder if you could read us a section from the book which is about a quarter of the way through when we hear a little bit more about sleep. This focuses on a psychiatrist who has been called into this town in the early stage of the epidemic to try to make sense of what’s happening.

Thompson Walker: [reading excerpt] “The eyelids flutter, the breathing is irregular, the muscle tone is visibly slack. With each new patient, Catherine notes it again, these signs that the sleepers might be dreaming. What weird cases. Curiosity is part of what keeps her coming back all this way. By her third visit to Santa Laura, a sleep specialist has confirmed it. The mapping of brain activity shows that these sleepers are indeed dreaming.

“Dreams have never much interested Catherine. The field of psychiatry has moved on to different territory. Most of her colleagues would argue that dreams are entirely meaningless. A kind of mental junk, randomly generated by the electrical impulses of the brain. Or at best, some might say, dreams are like religion, a force that exists outside the realm of science. But on her long drive home that night, it is hard not to wonder what it is those kids are dreaming of.

“Maybe they dream of the lost and the departed, the once known and the dead. They dream of lovers, certainly, the real and the imagined, that girl at the bar, that boy they used to know. Or else they dream, as Catherine sometimes does, the mundane dreams of cluttered desks and computer screens, the loading of laundry, the clatter of dishes, the mowing of overgrown lawns. They dream they can fly or they dream they can kill. Maybe they dream they are pregnant and feel elated. Or they dream that they are pregnant and are devastated. Or maybe one or two of them dream the answers to the problems they’ve been struggling with for years, like the 19th century German chemist who insisted that he discovered that the undiscovered structure of the chemical compound, benzene, came to him in the form of a dream.

“If any of those kids dream of falling from great heights, they do not, for the first time in their lives, wake up before their bodies hit the ground. Instead they dream right through those impacts and then go on dreaming after that.”

Miller: And they keep on dreaming. In the book, they end up filling up libraries because the hospitals are full, there are just all these places, big rooms full of sleeping babies and people in middle age and old people and tons and tons of college students. What was your own sleep like as you were writing this book?

Thompson Walker: Well, let’s see. I had two babies while I was … I mean, I gave birth to two babies over the years I was writing this book. So I think sleep had a sort of different kind of urgency and it was definitely more disrupted, obviously, than it would have been before. So, yeah, maybe there’s a bit of unconscious fantasizing about a sleep that goes on and on. Yeah, I was definitely not getting enough sleep a lot of the time that I was writing this book.

Miller: Were you more aware of your dreams?

Thompson Walker: I think writing this book made me more aware of it. And I also was very fascinated. My older daughter is now four-and-a-half and when she was around two, she started to kind of express her dreams. She didn’t know how to call them that, but that was really fascinating, to sort of see a human being introduced to the experience of dreaming and how she would try to describe what was happening when she closed her eyes.

Miller: Did that give you a different sense for what dreaming is? I mean, one of the things I’ve realized is when you’re dealing with a tiny person who’s experiencing the world in a new way, it forces you to strip down some of the adult ways of thinking about something and it forces you to reckon with something you thought you understood. Did that happen to you with dreams?

Thompson Walker: Yeah. I mean, I think watching her go through that and certainly just writing this book, it had this effect of just calling my own attention to how strange and bizarre and kind of wonderful dreaming is, and I love that it has that uncanny quality and yet is part of our daily lives.

Miller: You also note though in this piece … And this is about, that you just read us, the focus is on kind of the psychiatric world where it’s sort of declasse, at this point, to study dreams. That’s an early part of the 20th century that has been supplanted by other ways of thinking about the science of psychiatry. In a lot of ways, dreams and thinking about them, it’s uncool now.

Thompson Walker: It’s like unserious.

Miller: Is that something you had to reckon with as you were writing the book?

Thompson Walker: It’s interesting. I think I myself held that feeling a bit when I started writing this book. I knew I got interested in sleep and how the idea that what’s going on in our brains while we’re unconscious, and then inevitably this premise led me to start thinking about dreams and I became interested in a new way. So, yeah, I think that passage sort of shows how I tried to sort of acknowledge all the different ideas about dreaming. And it was a fun idea to try to treat dreams in a more serious way.

Miller: I kept thinking as I was reading the book that if this were to happen, if there were this mysterious illness that swept through some place, putting people into a sleep from which they may never wake up, but that also people start to realize there’s still some kind of brain activity going on – I thought some people would want this sickness, even if it was dangerous, maybe lethal, that some people might like the possibility of escaping from life in this particular way, in a kind of all encompassing dream world. Did you consider putting in characters who would seek out the infection?

Thompson Walker: I think that’s a really good question. I feel like that’s an idea that I arrived at only at the very end of my book and so there’s a kind of a quick moment where, in the aftermath of the sickness, there’s a certain kind of people who are like sort of searchers and seekers, start to come to this town with the idea of catching it, but it doesn’t play a big part in the book. But that’s the kind of thing as a novelist, that, if it was essential, I could have rewritten the book in that way. But in another way I felt like the book, it had already got on a slightly different trajectory. But it’s funny to … I still keep getting ideas afterwards.

Miller: So keep writing books, too. You touched on parenthood briefly, but I think it’s worth digging into more because it’s really one of the main themes of the novel. There are a couple of different parent-child relationships. But the biggest one is about this young academic couple with a newborn daughter. She’s really, she’s tiny. Why did you want to focus so much on parenthood?

Thompson Walker: When I started this book, I didn’t have any children. So I had no idea that it would become this sort of major theme. But I always knew it was going to be a book about relationships and about the varieties of love and what happens to those bonds in a crisis. So it did eventually feel natural to include parenthood. But of course, in my own life experience, my own preoccupations led me to include it. And actually, I think I’d written about 80 pages of this book when I had my first daughter, and it was just, I was still in those early days, like the first literally week or so of being a mother and getting to know a newborn, I suddenly had this idea that I had to add a newborn to this book. I felt so urgent and excited about that, even though I wasn’t doing a lot of work, I just scribbled down a note, like add a newborn to the novel.

Miller: Why now, with the benefit of what four-plus years, why were you compelled to do that?

Thompson Walker: I think just because – for me and for most of us – it’s just such an intense experience. And I was just noticing all these new things about human life, and like you said, about how having a young child can sort of call your attention to the things that you might have … after 35 years of life I’m used to it, but every little thing is new to her. And then to me, the experience of parenting was so new and that just, that novelty and intensity felt like I wanted to put it somewhere. I wanted to put it into what I was writing.

Miller: Sleep becomes a really terrifying thing for all the people who don’t have the illness, they see loved ones just fall down at times or go to sleep and not wake up. That’s something that a lot of very new parents feel when they see their sleeping tiny newborn for the very first time, there’s a terror that they’re not going to wake up. It’s totally separate from your fictional illness. Did you experience that with your kids? Like the fear of sleep that’s separate from a made up virus?

Thompson Walker: Yes. I mean, you want them to go to sleep and then, especially when I feel like when my daughter, the baby alone in her crib, so desperate for her to go to sleep, she goes to sleep, the relief of that lasts for like two minutes. And then immediately I wanted to put my hand on her back to make sure she was still breathing. So I certainly was very much in touch with that feeling. And I think maybe that kind of gets at just the uncanny nature of sleep. It makes sense that there’s a historical association or a kind of metaphorical association with sleep and death, because it looks like a kind of death or a kind of lifelessness, especially a deep sleep. And it’s scary when you’re the parent of the baby.

Miller: There are a lot of moments in the book – and we got sort of a taste of it in a few of the sentences that you read us – but there are a lot of others where people watch their loved ones or their friends or strangers sleeping. I don’t remember any book where there have been so many descriptions of people sleeping. Did you find that you would actually watch people you know sleeping, and in a different way?

Thompson Walker: Ah, that’s an interesting question. I mean, certainly my children, watching them sleep, certainly. I don’t know if I thought so much about it with other people. But yeah, it is the kind of thing that is so fundamentally strange if you spend two minutes thinking about it, and so spending five years thinking about sleep, certainly called my attention even more.

Miller: How much did you read into the actual science of what neuroscientists or sleep researchers know about what’s going on in our brains and in our bodies when we sleep? And how important is that to you as a novelist, to know the latest about what experts know?

Thompson Walker: Yeah, I did a fair amount of research into it. That’s one of the things I was excited about, once I came across this idea of a sleeping sickness was this chance to explore the history and science of sleep and dreaming. In a way, one of the most fascinating things about it for me is that scientists don’t completely agree on everything that sleep is doing for us and especially not what dreams are doing. So that feeling of a lingering mystery that people are still trying to figure out. And it’s in a way perhaps unknowable on some level, what’s really going on in our brains. I mean, I read about mapping the brain’s activity but there’s some kind of profound mystery even inside that that I’m attracted to writing about.

Miller: The why.

Thompson Walker: Yes, like what’s it for and why? And especially dreams, but sleep too, has mysteries on the scientific level, but I did do a fair amount of research. And I also wanted to make sure that it felt like I wanted to do enough research into the science so that I could make this story feel realistic even if it, of course, has this fantastical element. While the reader is reading it, I want them to feel like it was real. And so using a bit of science here and there was one of my strategies.

Miller: It seems like a little bit of a balancing act though because you start from, whether it’s this book or your earlier one, a premise of something that has not yet and hopefully will never happen to us. And so there is some kind of a speculative fiction sense here, but you also, in every other respect or even in that one, I guess, to feel real. Is that a fair way to put it?

Thompson Walker: Yes. I mean, it’s the illusion of reality which obviously fiction is, you’re always trying to convince the reader that something that’s not true is true. But yes, I wanted to have the sensation of realism in every other way. Like you take this one big leap and then after that, I hoped that it would just proceed logically from there, which is an idea that I also really got from that book “Blindness” by José Saramago. He has this idea that his writing is about the possibility of the impossible. So he might have chosen an impossible premise, but from there on, it’s like a sort of meticulous and logical unfolding of that premise. So I tried to do that with mine.

Miller: So, as you said, scientists haven’t totally figured out the why of sleep and not even the full mechanism of what it’s doing in our brains. Do you have a sense for what sleep is doing in your book? The why of sleep in your own book?

Thompson Walker: Oh, well, that’s an interesting way to think about it. I am very interested in how we all live with kind of uncertainty and unknowable territory. And so I feel like the book, I’m actually really interested in the fact that sleep is so inexplicable and yet so familiar. So I don’t know if I have a great answer for the big why of what it’s what it’s achieving in the book, except that it’s like this deep dive into one of the strangest and yet familiar parts of human experience.

Miller: And I can say without giving anything away that as a reader, there’s no clear cut answer about what’s happening in the brains of the dreamers as you go, which is one of the pleasures actually of the book.

Going back to parenting for a second, there were so many sentences and pages that I read where I thought only a parent could have written this. And then almost immediately, I would sort of chastise myself because that also strikes me as a kind of reductive thought. I mean, because the logical conclusion there is that you have to be a parent to write about parenting, you have to be an X to write about X’s experience, which seems reductive and it sort of diminishes what I like to think of as the empathetic power of good writing. But I’m wondering, do you think you could have written this book if you weren’t a parent?

Thompson Walker: I agree that I want fiction, as a reader and a writer, I want to feel like writers can use that, yeah, empathetic imagination to look into the lives of anyone, even if they’re completely different from themselves. But I still feel like there are certain moments of specificity and insight that I personally probably wouldn’t have been able to put into this book if I was just imagining parenthood. I mean, what I think, what I hope is that I would have been able to construct, hopefully, a convincing and yet illusory version of parenthood with my imagination, but there just are certain lines that I personally hadn’t come to until I was a parent.

Miller: You’re also not a late middle-aged gay man who’s taking care of his partner who has Alzheimer’s.

Thompson Walker: Right.

Miller: So I should say I didn’t make that up at random. That is another character in the book, a really moving part of the book. So there’s, obviously, empathetic imagination at work here as well.

Thompson Walker: Yes. And I worked really hard on that part because I was aware of the sort of difference between that character and my own life. I mean, maybe in another way, that in that storyline, I was having to use a lot of like my imagination and maybe parallel situations in my own life or in friends lives to try to imagine that character; whereas, in some of the parenting parts, I was able to just use literally the notes I was taking when my daughter was 11 days old or three weeks old. It just dropped right in.

Miller: Straight from life.

Thompson Walker: Yes. So it’s just sort of two different tools.

Miller: In your first novel, in “The Age of Miracles,” your narrator says this: “It never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different, unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.” That’s your character. Do you believe that?

Thompson Walker: I think I do believe that. In individual lives, I think that’s true, like just sort of moment to moment.

Miller: Worrying about the wrong things?

Thompson Walker: Well, I think in our own lives, I would say that. I think at the moment I feel like I’m very concerned, hopefully not just me, I mean, it’s a common concern about climate change. And I feel like that’s an example of … maybe we are worrying about the wrong things, because we’re not worried enough about climate change. But that’s one where I feel like, no, we should be worried about it.

Miller: If you had to worry, that’s not misplaced.

Thompson Walker: Yes. But I think, in individual lives, you just don’t know the course of an individual life and I just feel like it’s easy to be worried about, I don’t know, getting a certain disease, like getting cancer or something. But, it’s just so much more likely that something you never even thought of might be the challenge that happens to you. I think in individual lives, I think that, but maybe not as a society, all the time.

Miller: You gave a TED talk in 2012, I think it was. It’s gotten over two million views. You argued that if we start to see fears as stories that we tell ourselves, then we can basically treat them more critically, we can treat them like stories, we can read them, we can interrogate them, we can learn from them. Is that something that you actively do, still in your daily life, pay attention to your fears, treat them like a story and then listen to them?

Thompson Walker: It’s not like a sort of a daily thing, but I do. It’s something I thought about a lot when I was writing that talk. And I think something about my brain is quick to worry and quick to think of worst case scenarios. But I think thinking a little more carefully about those fears, over the years has made me probably a less anxious person than I was when I was younger. And I think it’s because of learning to sort of channel what’s useful about fear. Like in my own writing, I sometimes find it useful to experience worry, let’s say about how my book is, how a story is progressing, sort to think [think] like, “Oh, something is not right about this character,” or maybe, “This is a silly idea.” And that’s a kind of low level worry. But then it is very useful to me, I think, because then I hopefully eventually come to a solution. So that’s just a small example, but I think worry and fear can be just a really powerful motivator to sort of make changes in your life.

Miller: But they can also be debilitating.

Thompson Walker: Yes. Maybe runaway fears, but particularly if you’re worrying about things that there’s nothing you can do, that’s not useful to you. So I feel like that idea of trying to listen to the useful fears and not listen to the ones that are not as useful.

Miller: And having the wisdom to know the difference.

Thompson Walker: Yes. Well, that’s the part that is a kind of critical thinking or making a comparison with the way that we read stories, like read fiction, applying critical thinking and careful reading to a fear is a way to help decide which are the useful ones, which ones are not.

Miller: You brought up climate change as an example of the fear that we should have as a species. How much do you think climate change plays into both of your novels?

Thompson Walker: I sort of consider it to be just a kind of, something that is permeating the background of both books. And that’s because I feel like it’s this thing that’s unfolding now. So as an element of realism in my fiction, I always want to kind of touch on it, because it feels like something that’s going on right now, that’s one of the most important things facing humanity. So I guess I sort of touch on it in both cases. In my first book, “The Age of Miracles,” it really is about a catastrophe that is affecting the entire planet.

Miller: It unfolds and gets worse as it goes and has a lot of environmental impacts that really do mirror the effects we’re already seeing, climate change that we’re likely to see even more of.

Thompson Walker: Yeah.

Miller: And in that sense, it was sort of inescapable.

Thompson Walker: Yes. And I used climate change as a kind of … I tried to learn from how people were responding to climate change when I was writing my fictional scenario. So on the one hand, the way that people can sort of get used to this terrifying idea that our climate is changing. There’s something sort of, on the one side, I think it kind of stems from a kind of beautiful resilience in humanity.

Miller: A calm, carry on idea.

Thompson Walker: Yes. Yes. But then there’s a kind of terrifying corollary to that, which is that we might just fail to make the changes we need to make because we’re so good at returning to ordinary life.

Miller: Keep calm all the way to our demise.

Thompson Walker: Yes. And not let fear sort of drive us to make the changes that we need to make. So, yeah, I did try to capture that feeling in “The Age of Miracles.”

Miller: One thing that unifies both of your novels is that there’s a deep mystery at the center of them. I mean, people experiencing both these different kinds of either catastrophes or illnesses, they don’t really understand why what’s happening to them is happening to them. And we, as readers, as a result, we are left wondering too, because you keep us in the dark to a great extent. What interests you in this not knowing and withholding information?

Thompson Walker: It’s something that people ask me about a lot and I think my gut reaction is that it feels to me like realism. Especially [when] something new happens and maybe something new and scary, like a lot of times we don’t know. People with this book, I did, like you said, keep it kind of open or it’s not explained why some people get it and some people don’t. And a certain kind of reader is like, but I can’t believe that wasn’t made clear. And to me I’m like, in life, that’s one of the main elements of experiencing an illness in life, is why do some people get it and some people don’t? We don’t know. And so to me, it feels realistic and it feels almost artificial to explain too much or to make the answers too crisp. Even though I can understand the impulse in a reader too, when you’re reading fiction to get that satisfaction that maybe you don’t always get in real life.

Miller: But the idea of omniscience on the part of the reader, you’re allergic to it.

Thompson Walker: Well, yeah, I just want to keep it close to the experience that the people are having. So, yeah, it just feels like it feels unrealistic to me.

Miller: It’s interesting that the response you’ve gotten, because maybe it does come from a sense that the world is full of so many things we don’t understand and that scare us and now you’re going to subject me to 300 pages that has even more things that are slightly mysterious and certainly scary. In a sense that’s what some people have told you.

Thompson Walker: Yeah. Well, I’m trying to make it seem like this really happened. And in both books, the other thing is I’ve invented these unreal scenarios. So once that’s unreal, the chance of an explanation for me is even lower if I’m trying to make it feel like realism, but I can definitely understand the other perspective where it’s like you want to have an explanation in fiction…

Miller: In a sense, it’s the opposite from what a standard mystery novel gives you …

Thompson Walker: Yes.

Miller: … where you experience the mystery as you go, but the point is by the end that you have arrived at some answer, maybe you can revel in your cleverness that you’ve got there before it’s been revealed. But by the end of it, the world has clicked into place and all the answers are there, and that’s not at all what you want to provide.

Thompson Walker: Yes. That’s right. I mean, that’s it. It’s a different kind of reading experience, yeah, for sure.

Miller: How do you think about the balance between following the rules of the universe as we know them or the rules of biology as we know them and then playing with that, playing with physics and biology or neuroscience or whatever?

Thompson Walker: I think, like I said before, I’m interested in … It’s like a magic trick of making something feel as if it’s real, even if it’s not. That’s where my mind is a lot like, what science can I play with and use that will make this seem real? And then sometimes it’s, what kinds of things can I leave out that might raise questions that would start to make it not seem as real? And I think the big question for me sometimes is just, I want to please the sort of general reader who knows something about those fields. The thing that’s a little more distracting is, I don’t know if I will pull it out for a physicist, I don’t know. But I try not to directly misstate any science. If there is science, if it’s directly addressed, I want it to be accurate all the time. But I am always obviously playing a little, because these are imaginary scenarios on purpose.

Miller: There’s the science aspect of this or the natural world part, but to a great extent, you’re also investigating cultural questions or societal questions. What happens when there is some kind of crisis, how does society respond? How do the social bonds, are they frayed or are they strengthened? And it seems like in both books, the results are sort of mixed. If you’re a pessimistic reader, you can find plenty of examples of the dissolution of society. But if you’re reading it more positively, there are moments of love and selflessness and people coming together. How much faith do you have in us and in humans as social creatures in crisis?

Thompson Walker: I mean, on a sort of gut level, I’ve always resisted some of the worst, maybe like a sort of Hollywood blockbuster stereotype of how a lot of people would sort of become their worst selves in a crisis. That just doesn’t feel accurate to my sense of humanity. Of course, there were going to be a few bad actors, but I just feel like a lot of people would not be so extreme. They wouldn’t go to either extreme, I guess. Maybe they’re not going to be an unbelievable hero, but they’re also not going to harm their neighbors in order to help themselves. I aim for a more middle ground, ordinary version of how people respond. And some people I think would be at their best.

I actually read a fascinating nonfiction book called “A Paradise Built In Hell” by Rebecca Solnit. And that is about the history of real disasters and how often, there is a more complicated story and sometimes it is about a kind of unexpected sense of community and generosity that people experience. It’s a very serious book. It’s not a sentimental book about, oh humans are wonderful. But it just traces these stories that maybe are more accurate, that people are helping each other more than harming each other in those kinds of situations.

Miller: But in both of your novels, the emotional center is a young woman who is socially isolated, who’s often watching what’s happening from the outside. And she’s often described by her peers as a rule follower. Why are you drawn to this character?

Thompson Walker: The young girl, Julia, in my first book and then a freshman college student, Mei, in my second book, I think there’s some version of that I identify with. Like the kid or the person who’s more likely to be the observer than the person sort of driving the action in a certain situation, especially in youth, that’s a particular thing that people divide into those types. And I feel for me, there’s some amount that I identify with. I mean, neither character is exactly me, but I was able to draw on experiences I had as a kid or as a freshman in college. But also even more than actually being like those characters, I had a kind of sort of worry or fear that I would be left out in some way, or that I’d be too quiet to make friends in a certain situation. Those are familiar.

Miller: That’s even more meta though, not necessarily that you were that person, but that you had a fear that you would be that person.

Thompson Walker: Well, maybe that gets back to this idea that fear, it’s a powerful, imaginative experience, so I had a sense … So in both cases, I would say that they are much more isolated than I ever was, but I was able to sort of, [there were] moments when I sort of enlarged into whole characters. And I also just have so much sympathy for that person, who in any situation is the person who’s sort of on the side or doesn’t quite fit in or feels like they don’t quite fit in or isn’t making friends as quickly as others. So it’s just like I have a tenderness and a fondness for that too.

Miller: They also make for good narrators because, sort of the psychology of this person makes them basically natural storytellers. Based on who they are in life, they can’t help but tell us about the people they’re seeing because they’re observers.

Thompson Walker: They’re sort of literally standing on the side.

Miller: But they’re also rule followers. Where does that come from?

Thompson Walker: Maybe that comes from me. I mean, especially as a kid. I’m not sure that my children are going to be quite as much like a goody goody as I was as a kid. To me, a very exotic thing as a child or a teenager was watching someone else, like a friend or not a friend, completely breaking the rules. That was really hard to imagine doing myself even though it seemed sort of exciting. I think that’s just, I’m drawing again on my own sort of personality.

Miller: But the early indications are you’re not going to be that lucky as a parent?

Thompson Walker: I don’t know, I’m waiting. I haven’t seen that (laughter).

Miller: You grew up in California, right?

Thompson Walker: Yes.

Miller: That’s where both of these books take place. And in both books, in different ways, the state, this often physically idyllic place, it’s also full of menace. And the state, factually, if there is almost any kind of natural disaster that exists in the world, you can find a version of it in California. Did you feel that growing up, the menace of California?

Thompson Walker: Yeah. I definitely did. I don’t know if I could have as a child understood how specific that parts of that are to living in California. But definitely the fear of earthquakes in particular, but also wildfires was just a part of my childhood. So, in a way it was something I was really afraid of at times, but then in other ways, I was used to it. I’m not sure if it would make sense to do it here, I’m not sure if they do, but as a child one of my most vivid memories is every year in elementary school, in addition to school supplies, we had to bring a three day supply of nonperishable food. And that was the food we would eat if the big earthquake struck.

Miller: And that was up to each kid to do that as opposed to something that would be provided by the school?

Thompson Walker: Yeah, it was like you bring in your three day supply.

Miller: I’ve never heard that.

Thompson Walker: I know. I don’t …

Miller: Where would you keep it?

Thompson Walker: At the beginning of school, you find out where you’re going to be sitting and you drop your Ziploc bag into this big trash bin used as storage, and I don’t know where they kept it in the school. It didn’t necessarily live in the classroom, I don’t think, but, I don’t know.

Miller: And hope for the best that you get your can of Dinty Moore when the big one hits.

Thompson Walker: And then at the end of the year, yeah, you got it back (laughter). But anyway, so that’s an example of, it sort of built into the fabric, this possibility that your entire life could be turned upside down. And so I feel like it was just built into my childhood.

Miller: Do you feel like you have more California stories in yourself? You’ve lived in plenty of other places now – 12 years in New York City, a year-and-a-half in Portland. You spent a little bit of time in Iowa as well. I mean, are you still a California story writer at heart?

Thompson Walker: Yeah. It’s interesting. This book, “The Dreamers,” I started when I was living in Iowa City, which I was there for about two years, and I thought I was going to set it in Iowa. When I first got to Iowa, I was interested in what to me was a sort of foreign landscape and the threat of tornadoes and just a sort of slightly different culture. But when I was maybe 50 pages in, I started to just feel like a longing to set it in California again. And so I moved the setting to California and I think there’s something about the place, at least in my case, the place where you grow up. I just haven’t yet known the landscape of a place as intimately as I still feel like I know Southern California. So I don’t know, it’s hard. I think I probably will keep writing, I don’t know if every story I ever write will be in California. But I know there’s always going to be a pull to it.

Miller: There’s a flip side. We’ve been talking so much about fear and worries and being scared, but the flip side comes from one of your characters who says there’s something satisfying in it, something he’s talking about. But he says, “that the plain reality of the universe reads to us like magic.” I mean, you call your books, “The Dreamers” and “The Age of Miracles,” not the age of catastrophes or the people who might never wake up and might die in their beds after sleeping for a year. That’s not the title of your books. How much does wonder play into what you want to do as opposed to fear?

Thompson Walker: Yeah, it’s like the fear helps me figure out what the story is going to be, like what’s the thing that’s going to keep a reader turning pages? And hopefully, if I were reading it, would make me turn pages. But then the sense of exploring the kind of wonder of ordinary human existence or just the fact of human experience is maybe on a deeper level, even more important to me, like capturing just how kind of extraordinary ordinary human experience is.

Miller: Karen Thompson Walker, thanks so much for joining us and congratulations on this new book. It’s great.

Thompson Walker: Thank you for having me.

Miller: That’s Karen Thompson Walker in conversation in 2019.

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